I’ve noticed a huge increase in friend requests on Facebook and invitations to connect on LinkedIn that come from logos, not faces. I don’t accept any of them, and here’s why: the word “social” precedes the word “media” for a reason. Social media is social. My Oxford American dictionary defines social thus:
1. of or relating to society or its organization; 2. concerned with the mutual concerns of human beings or of classes of human beings; 3. living in organized communities.
Nowhere in that definition do the words corporation, brand, or enterprise appear. It’s all about human beings: their activities, their concerns.
So why should I be “friends” with a logo? I’ve ignored friend requests from restaurants, insurance companies, car dealers, and a host of other branded personal profiles. I’m looking for a human connection, and only then will I consider adding a connection to a brand represented by that human connection.
On LinkedIn, this seems even more egregious. I understand that many small business owners are solopreneurs, and their company brand and their personal identity can seem to be inextricably intertwined. However, I want to see and connect with the person. And then, based on my assessment of their talents/value/contributions, I might choose to follow their company.
But they have to convince me that they’re human first.
Major brands make the same mistake on a larger scale, and have since the enterprise emerged after the Industrial Revolution. That’s been the subject of both humor – “what’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA!” from Al Capp’s L’il Abner was inspired by Eisenhower SecDef and former GM CEO Charles Wilson’s Congressional testimony that included “what’s good for GM is good for the country” – and rage. The rage includes everything from the Motrin Moms mess, to the #epicfail that was the BP Deepwater Horizon spill aftermath, to the continued cluelessness of Wall Street and Washington about the ultimate betrayal that is “too big to fail”.
Corporations are made out of … people. Building are full of … people. People do business with … people. Brand loyalty is really driven by the actions of humans on behalf of their human customers. It doesn’t matter if you’re B2C, slinging sandwiches from a food cart, or B2B, slinging enterprise-level cloud services to Fortune 5s. You’re a human being, doing business with other human beings.
Lose sight of your humanity, and that of your customers, and you no matter how big you are, you’re destined to fail.
And please stop wasting my time with “friend” requests from logos. Be human, then be a brand.
I had the opportunity/privilege to participate in a conversation with other health activists and e-patients about a Digital Patient Bill of Rights recently.
I don’t care what being in love means regarding saying you’re sorry. Personally, I think Erich Segal’s book sucks, but I digress.
If you’re in business – running one, managing one, working for one – you’re in the apology business. In fact, being human puts you in the apology business 24/7/365. And business always needs a good dose of human, particularly in the age of the 24-hour news cycle and the Facebook Fan Page wall post.
Not being human, and being willing to admit you made a mistake? #fail.
In a great post on INC.com, Tim Donnelly gives very solid tips on how to approach the brand apology when your business screws the pooch. His #1 tip: just say it. “I’m sorry.” Simple … so why is it so hard for a brand to do that?
I think the root cause of brand cluelessness is that businesses forget that they are, after all, human. They may own skyscrapers in cities around the world, but guess what? Those buildings are full of … people. Doing business with … people.
When your spouse, or your buddy, or your kid do something to hurt you or your feelings, they apologize. You do the same thing when you screw up. (If you don’t, let me know. I know some terrific divorce attorneys.) Same rules apply if you’re J.C. Penney, the example that Donnelly uses in his piece.
Be human, don’t be a brand-droid.
You don’t have to literally fall on your sword, or drape yourself in sackcloth and ashes (I still have random PTSD episodes from 12 years of Catholic education) to apologize. You don’t have to take responsibility for every goof since the beginning of your brand’s recorded history, either. Just say you’re sorry, and then you can move on.
If your factory releases a cloud of toxic gas that kills a few thousand people, you’ll have to do a little more than say “sorry” – just ask Union Carbide. Oh, right, you can’t ask them, because they never actually said they were sorry about poisoning Bhopal. Which explains why they WENT OUT OF BUSINESS.
See how powerful an apology could be? And how not issuing one might literally kill your business?
Use words that convey regret without taking responsibility for every hurt the offended party has ever suffered. Just saying “I’m sorry” can completely defuse a brand revolt. Couple that apology with a clear outline of how you plan to remedy the hurt: priceless. Really. Try it.
We all make mistakes. We’re human, that’s part of the journey. A business that recognizes its own humanity, and that of its customers, by making a sincere apology when they screw up will ultimately drive more loyalty for their brand than a business that’s 24/7 shiny-happy-people. ‘Cause shiny-happy will eventually fog up, or blow up. Trust me on that one.
The headline on this post is the title of Richard Branson‘s business memoir. The full title: Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life and Business. The link will take you to the book on Amazon, so you can just do it and buy the book.
I had the opportunity to literally see Branson in action on Friday, 9/9/11 at Richmond Unite’s #DSRPT11 conference right here in River City (Richmond VA), which also featured some other visionary thinkers who exhorted the crowd in attendance to get out of their business comfort zones and create some disruption.
Richard Branson has disrupted many industries: music, aviation, travel, mobile, broadband, just to name a few. He talked about his failures (Anybody here remember Virgin Cola? Yeah, me neither.), and was anxious to convey the message that his “screw it, let’s do it” rallying cry became even more important to him because of those failures. There is only do, or not do. There is no try. Thanks, Yoda.
The other big thinkers on the stage all shared the same ethos – look beyond what you perceive as your borders, whether those borders are physical, mental, geographical, or just imaginary. If you have an idea, chase it down and make it real. If you fail, get up and chase the next idea. Immobility is your only enemy.
One of the speakers, Harry Singer, said two things during his presentation that really stuck with me, and with other folks I talked to at #DSRPT11:
Don’t ask why, figure out how
Don’t tell them what it is, tell them what it does
The first is something we should teach children from birth, and keep on teaching them and each other throughout our lives. The second is a titanium nugget if you’re in sales or marketing: what your product or service does for your customers is much more important than what it is. Communicate the doing rather than the being.
Kelly O’Keefe, a branding guru who’s also on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University’sBrandcenter – which is one of the top design schools in the world – spoke about the opportunities present in our current economic downturn to focus on social entrepreneurship. He talked a lot about Detroit – his home town – and the true crisis that city has been in since the Japanese started eating the lunch of Detroit’s Big 3 car makers. That crisis has deepened into a catastrophe as the global economy has imploded. Kelly said it was the outliers – the nerds, the artists, the revolutionaries – who were making a true difference in Detroit, and helping that city rise from its own ashes.
I too had the opportunity to take the stage. I was to have eight minutes, and was invited to create a slide deck for it, which I did. My slice-o-time was to be during lunch. As will happen, the morning speakers ran long, and since Richard Branson was to take the stage at about 3:30pm, the time was to be made up during lunch come hell or high dudgeon. Each of us would have only TWO minutes, no slides. Two of the eight presenters dropped out because their presentations were so visual. The remaining four that weren’t me did what they did, some ran over.
I was always slated to be the last speaker. My topic was that patients need to seize control of healthcare, which is the only sane path to real and meaningful healthcare reform, no matter what your politics are. I knew I had to do two things: Keep it tight – I took the stage at 1:26pm, the afternoon session was starting ON TIME at 1:30pm – and, since there was a post-lunch food nap induction driven further snooze-ward by the fact that the attendees had been in their seats since 9:00am, WAKE ‘EM UP.
My attitude? Screw it, let’s do it.
Here’s a from-the-seats clip of the last :56 of my total 1:48 (I timed myself like every pro speaker must). The full version will get posted as soon as I get it from the video group who did the gavel-to-gavel coverage. Let me know what you think – I really DO want to know.
On August 27, a very angry Hurricane Irene came calling all up and down the east coast, including Virginia – which is where I live. I have plenty of hurricane experience, including a sojourn 500 miles offshore in a schooner during a Category 1 hurricane. I don’t recommend that experience unless you really want to know what your laundry feels like on max-agitate in your washing machine.
Landmasses with human habitation that are visited by hurricanes always have plenty of wind and flooding damage, and our experience with Irene was pretty typical. Lots of trees were knocked down, which took a lot of power lines with ‘em, meaning that lots of local utility customers were in the steamy dark once Irene blew town.
#1 cause of a PR crisis: lots of unhappy people.
No one – at least, no one with a mature level of life experience – could have expected Dominion Virginia Power to restore everyone to lighted bliss immediately. Those of us who were here during Hurricane Isabel (hurricanes with “I” names must hate the Commonwealth of Virginia) knew we were in for a sweaty, dark few days, at least.
Crews from utilities in surrounding states came in to help Dominion crews get us all lit up again. They are still working their butts off, and they are most certainly not the target of this post’s ire.
Because Dominion has truly screwed the PR/crisis-comms pooch on Irene’s aftermath.
All the interactive outage maps in the world – and Dominion has some great ones – mean squat to customers who have to huddle in a local Panera or library to view them. Announcing where crews are working via local media is of some help.
What Dominion failed to do, however, was put a face on the problem. One of their top leadership team needed to become the face and voice of Dominion as they worked to restore their customers to the grid. As I write this – Sunday, Sept. 3 – 20% of Richmond-area customers are still without power.
That means that 1 out of 5 Dominion customers in this region are still in a Bronte novel, at least at night, wandering from room to room clutching candles. The contents of their refrigerators and freezers are long gone, and if they have an all-electric kitchen, they ain’t cooking dinner, either.
No one from Dominion’s senior leadership has been very visible during this event. The company’s Facebook page has been the wall where the unhappy sweaty scrum have been posting their displeasure, which has only compounded the problem, since the person or persons who manage the page seem to be as clueless as the rest of us. One response they posted in reply to a customer’s inquiry about the fact that the middle of a street was still dark, while the houses at each end had been restored:
I am sorry, we aren’t quoting specific restoration times. I don’t have the level of operations information you are looking for.
Why on earth is the person who is representing a utility on a major social network NOT given access to operations information at a meaningful level? This tells me that Dominion views social media as a one-more-thing activity, rather than a key communication tool.
#fail.
For next time, here are my recommendations. Dominion may or may not ever see these, but I already feel better for posting them.
Make a top leader the face and voice of the company during the crisis.
Have that face-and-voice respond to media inquiries at least daily, if not more frequently. What that leader says must be mirrored in/on every online outlet for customer-facing company information … which includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al.
If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” Shiny-happy-people, pie-in-the-sky, promise-the-world will only lead to the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Possibly yours.
Tell the truth. This goes hand in hand with #3.
Simple. Works for a utility, a consumer-products company, a hospital, a factory. Have a leader lead, tell the truth.
I consider London to be one of my home-towns – I grew up in a government-service family, we moved frequently, and one of the places we called home was London in the ’60s and ’70s.
I watched, with deep sorrow, as large parts of Greater London, and then Birmingham, fell under the torches and bricks of rampaging looters, ostensibly in protest of the death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham during what was either a traffic stop or a drug-squad operation. Whichever version is true, the aftermath was crystal clear: chaos.
Fueled by SMS technology, unrest armed with bricks and gasoline spread like wildfire across the London suburbs: Tottenham, Ealing, Barnet, Camden, and a host of other communities became war zones. Scotland Yard was caught flat-footed, with the recent leadership shake-up driven by the Murdoch mess getting blamed for their slow response.
The viral nature of 21st century communication is a powerful tool – for good, or for ill. Like the viruses it takes its name and nature from, “viral” has no morals. It just knows one thing: SHARE ME.
The danger compounds itself by what’s usually seen, in the heat of the moment, as the only way to prevent chaos, to control the message: shut down free access.
That’s what governments in the Middle East are doing to shut down their citizens’ demands for free democracy, and what the British government was asking companies like Research in Motion (the Blackberry folks) to help them do: shut down the viral vector. SMS technology, social sharing.
It’s a dangerous game, that shutting-down. Because once you’ve started, where and when do you stop? When the High St. stops burning? When the last street is cleaned? After some kind of vetting-council “approves” you for re-connection to Facebook?
The lesson here is the same one I advise businesses to take with their communication strategy: LISTEN FIRST. If governments – be they in Lagos or London – have an active listening program in place, they’ll know that they have a problem before it literally bursts into flame.
That’s true for corporate governance, civic governance, every part of human endeavor. Mark Duggan’s death may have been the match that lit the flame, but the fuel was laying all over the ground long before that match was struck.
When it comes to your community, are you LISTENING? To your fellow citizens, to your customers, to your constituents?
Failure to use your ears will mean you’ll have to learn how to use a fire extinguisher. Which is really challenging when your house is already on fire.
